Monica Dolan has worn many vests during her long acting career. She has become one of those actors whose participation in a project almost guarantees quality. She tends to play characters that wrap themselves in a tight knit; women who look harmless or seem invisible to the whole world. But pull the strings of these characters and the idea of safety soon unraveled. She won a Bafta Award for her role as serial killer Rose West in 2011 and recently appeared in one of the best dramas of the year, The Thief, his wife and canoe, as Anne Darwin, imprisoned for fraud after helping her husband his John, to falsify his own death. Dolan jokes that her nephews have denied her that she took on so many vest roles. “They say I need to do something more glamorous and not wear so many vests. But I think they’ve given up now, “she said.
It’s a sunny afternoon in Hammersmith, where she’s lived for many years, and we meet at a cafe on the Thames. She brought with her Velma, her four-month-old husky puppy, much to everyone’s delight. About half of the conversation is at work, the rest is doggy. Velma is Dolan’s first adult dog. She chose huskies because growing up in Woking, she lived across the street from a family that raised them. “I was there all the time. I completely fell in love with them. ” Dolan, who is also a playwright, is very good at storytelling. One day, when she was four, she says, the dogs ran away. The owners were on vacation. “My mother put most of them in the car, but my father Boris was quite aggressive. Boris had made his way to a local cricket field, where he was surrounded by local police. “Obviously I went to the dog and he growled,” I said [she puts on a stern voice]: “Boris!” and he just followed me. I don’t seem to have the same effect on Velma right now, “she added, smiling. Velma is sitting under Dolan’s chair, every bit of a model puppy.
We’re here to talk about My Name is Leon, the BBC adaptation of Keith de Waal’s novel, a wonderful, touching film starring Dolan playing Maureen, foster care in Birmingham in the ’80s (she wears a vest). But there are sharp edges to the story: racism, mental illness, deep injustice, a care system that doesn’t work. “I thought the script was one of the best I’ve ever read,” she said. “He was very ready. Even the hours of the day were written in the titles of the scenes, so it was very clear. This is so important because then everyone knows the tone and knows what they are doing. ”
“I thought the script was one of the best I’ve read”: in the upcoming My Name is Leon. Photo: Ben Gregory-Ring / BBC / Douglas Road Productions
This required a Birmingham accent, which Dolan easily wrapped around the words “Curly Wurly.” It has an unlikely origin. “I was listening to White Dee,” she explains. White Dee, also known as Deirdre Kelly, was the protagonist of the Channel 4 Benefits Street documentary series. “She interviewed Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. This is a really good interview. I listened to it over and over and watched it every day before we started. ” Dolan loves to make accents and studies them in depth. She did Welsh in the BBC W1A comedy and Rose West’s accent in Gloucester in “Suitable Adult.” She focused on the recent Bronx for theatrical work, Doubt, at the Chichester Festival Theater. She found Anne Darwin’s Hartlepool accent harder to master, but she worked with a dialect coach until she got it. She and her colleague Eddie Marsan, who played John Darwin, kept the voice of their characters during the filming, but she said it was just practical. “These are the muscles of your face,” she added, touching her jaw. It makes sense to keep training the same. She is practical in her work and seems practically allergic to everything too pretentious-acting.
Dolan also has a personal connection to the Northeast. She was born in Middlesbrough to Irish parents – her mother is from Eniscorthy and studied botany and biochemistry, and her father is a chemical engineer from Dublin. She was one of four siblings, and they moved a lot, following in the footsteps of her father, Essex, Durham, Bexleheath, and Stockton, before eventually settling in Woking, where her mother still lives. “So, although I didn’t speak with that accent when I was young, I heard a lot from him and he has a really warm association with him. Definitely came in. ”
The canoe, as she calls it, was a hit. As we speak, Dara Ó Brian comes with an apology to tell Dolan how much he loves her in this – of course, we joke that she paid him for it. She says she didn’t know much about the case before taking the job, although she remembers hearing about John Darwin’s return on the news before the full scale of what happened became clear. “The first thing I remember was that this man went into a police station saying he had amnesia and they thought he was a missing canoeist, and everyone said, ‘Oh, wow, God, that’s amazing.’
She has never met Anne Darwin. In the middle of filming, during a break caused by Covid, Dolan went to a barbecue, where he finally talked to someone who knew David Lee, the journalist who revealed the story of Darwin’s fraud. He connected her to Lee, who showed her some of Anne Darwin’s letters from prison. “After talking to me, he asked her. He said: how would you feel meeting Monica? And she said, “No, I’d rather not.” And I understand that. “
Resident evil: as Rosemary West with Dominic West as Fred West in “Appropriate Adult” from 2011. Photo: ITV / Shutterstock
Until I watched the drama, I didn’t know that Anne Darwin had been sentenced longer than her then-husband. “Yes. He received six years and three months, and she six years and six months. I think there may have been an element of moral judgment about her, and in a sense, maybe that should have been left to her family.
When Dolan first read the scripts for Canoe, she told the programmakers that she was worried that Anne hadn’t been released too much. “I wanted to see her lie more because, well, she did, and I saw that the writer wanted us to sympathize with her. But I also felt it was more fun to get into a scene where she just lied or someone said she lied. “We all lied at one point,” she said. “It simply came to our notice then. It was done well because it is a pardon, not a denial that she did it. What this family has achieved in terms of forgiveness is pretty amazing. ”
The cast plans to meet for drinks tonight, celebrate the show’s success and catch up. Marsan can’t do it because he’s shooting elsewhere, but I called to ask him about working with Dolan. “Personally, I think she is one of the greatest actresses of our generation and I have always wanted to work with her,” he said. He told me that he auditioned to play Fred West in “The Right Adult” (the role went to Dominic West) and was disappointed that he didn’t have the opportunity to work with her at the time. What’s up with her? “She is disappearing because she is not vain in any way. He’s losing himself, but not in a condescending way. “He compares her to Olivia Coleman, with whom he also worked, in the sense that it took the industry several years to figure out what to do with her.” Oh, ” Dolan laughs when he mentions it, “Then I’ll wait and see what he does to me.”
I say I feel like your moment. “This is my moment,” she sings, entering the classics of Martin McCutchen. “I think I was really lucky. I’ve worked a lot, but I also get bored quite easily, which I guess is good and bad. This means that if I played a role, then I would want to do something very different. “This explains the restless feeling about her screen career (her stage career is just as diverse). From comedy (Alan Partridge, W1A) to periodic dramas. Wolf Hall, Vanity Fair), through movies like Days of the Bagnold Summer, The Dig, Pride, Black Mirror, Strike, Inside No. 9, the revived Talking Heads… she finished the mall. “I think your characters stretch you too. Learn more for people and what people are capable of. And when you play people who do very extreme things, you see what is possible and imagine. ” She and Marsan are drawn to what she calls “extreme heroes” and joked about it on Canoe’s set, where they turned to the camera and pretended to be on a version of the Genealogy Who Do You Think You Are show. ? They called him Who the hell am I?
“I can’t believe I’ve wasted so many years without having a dog”: with the puppy Velma. Monica Dolan wears a blouse by Edeline Lee (fenwick.co.uk); pants from meandem.com and sandals from russellandbromley.co.uk. Photo: Zoe McConnell / The Observer
Dolan’s work ethic sounds incredible. Early in her career, a theater director advised her to look at the jobs in front of her instead of allowing herself to be guided by broader ambitions. For example, if she is offered a play, then she should consider the merits of that play instead of thinking about whether she would prefer to play television or a movie. This principle has guided her since she began. “It means you’re doing a lot, and it’s a pretty nice way to try to stay true to yourself,” she says.
If she was offered a big American series that required her to sign up for the same role for seven years, say, would she? “If it was in front of me and I read it, I could. But I’ve never been very good at engagement. I wanted to be Brownie, and in a week I wanted to leave. My mother said no, if you were in the army, you wouldn’t be able to leave in a week. So I had to stay. ”
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